Help Your Preschooler Get Ready to Read

And for good reason: reading is an incredibly complex process that requires children to recognize shapes (letters), match these shapes with their corresponding sounds, combine these sounds into words, and then mentally pair these word with their definitions. Emerging readers must also begin to understand and apply decoding rules, pause at punctuation, and infer word meanings based on context clues.

And of course, decoding a string of words is just the beginning of what it means to be a strong reader.